Khloe

“He felt that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is called, from the heart—that is to say, had said only just what they were thinking and feeling—they would simply have looked into each other's faces, and Konstantin could only have said, "You're dying, you're dying!" and Nikolay could only have answered, "I know I'm dying, but I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" And they could have said nothing more, if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had been trying to do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as far as he could observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and without it there was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not thinking, but he felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that his brother detected him in it, and was exasperated at it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I'm nothing if not completely inconsistent.”
― Lynn Weingarten, Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls

“I didn’t have the heart to tell her
she’s mistaking bravery
for flat-out
desperation.”
― K.A. Holt, House Arrest

“our tragedy begins humid.
in a humid classroom.
with a humid text book. breaking into us.
stealing us from ourselves.
one poem. at a time.

it begins with shakespeare.

the hot wash.
the cool acid. of
dead white men and women. people.

each one a storm.

crashing. into our young houses.
making us islands. easy isolations.
until we are so beleaguered and
swollen
with a definition of poetry that is white skin and
not us.
that we tuck our scalding. our soreness.
behind ourselves and
learn
poetry.
as trauma. as violence. as erasure.
another place we do not exist.
another form of exile
where we should praise. honor. our own starvation.

the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley.
and
angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats.
that give us slight rest.

to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of
my own bursting
extraordinary
self.
and to have
this
be
called
education.

to take my name out of my name.
out of where my native poetry lives. in me.
and
replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot…

(what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.)

and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies.


(years later. the conclusion:


shakespeare is relative.

white literature is relative.

that we are force fed the meat of
an animal
that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition.
is not relative.
is inert.)”
― Nayyirah Waheed , Nejma